Fiction Ruined My Family (15 page)

 

 

 

 

A LITERATURE PROFESSOR at SUNY Purchase named Bell Chevigny was the advisor on our senior project, the two-woman show that Carmen and I wrote and performed. Bell had just written a novel and she invited us to her apartment around Riverside and 110th for a book party. She gave us an inscribed copy of her new novel. Was there anything cooler? I was friends with someone whose book was published, a woman, someone who was happily married and had two daughters. Carmen liked Bell quite a bit, we both did, but Bell was an important symbol for me, a happy, successful writer with a family and many friends who was not living in poverty. Bell wasn't a drunk, either. A mother. A writer. A normal person.

Our two-woman show,
This Side of Virginity
, a play on the title of Fitzgerald's first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, was a big hit, got a great review in that journalistic knockout of a student newspaper,
The Load
. We were on our way, like the acting students, the dancers everybody wanted to fuck, the painters who rode around on vintage bikes in jeans splattered in multicolored oils, the ultra-focused film majors, to artistic superiority. I thought we'd hit
Saturday Night Live
to start off with and then I would bust out a humor piece in
The New Yorker
, establishing me as an incredibly hilarious serious writer. The movies and plays I would do would insure I could travel as much as I wanted and not have to work jobs to support the precarious writing life. Unlike my father, I had a backup plan, a plan B as they say. Acting. I'd like to reiterate in case you missed that: Acting was my backup career, my safety net so that I wouldn't have to be broke.

 

 

 

Dad came to our show and loved it and called every other day with ideas for Carmen and me and our next show. He thought it'd be great if we did a parody of William F. Buckley's TV show,
Firing Line
. Carmen didn't even know what that was, and I tried to explain to Dad the utter lunacy of a twentyyear-old Dominican woman playing William F. Buckley while I took on the role of John Kenneth Galbraith.
Meet the Press
was another show he thought we'd be terrific at parodying.

He'd leave messages on our answering machine. “Jean, it's Dad. I got an idea for you. I got an idea for you, I got an idea for Carmen . . .”

A
T FIRST THEY ACTED like normal divorced people. They were angry and they spoke badly of one another and dated other people and not each other. Mom could actually smell our father on us when we came in the door on Sunday night after a weekend at his place.

“Have you been at your father's? You reek of franks and beans.” He was renting his friend Quig's house in Springs, Long Island, and the wood-burning stove there, the “black cat” as his neighbor the artist Saul Steinberg called it, did leave you smelling as if you had been camping. That first Thanksgiving they were divorced she forbade him to enter her apartment, so Dad took us to a sushi place on Third Avenue, not a “Calvin Trillin Chinatown dumpling house on Thanksgiving” kind of place, but rather a last-minute “Dad didn't make a reservation anywhere” kind of place. The place was empty, aka totally depressing and potentially gastro-disastrous. My dad was not a big sushi person but the man would eat anything; he had a tendency to finish everything on his plate and then reach toward yours.

“Are you going to eat that piece of mackerel there, Jean-Joe?” my dad said, hand poised above the piece of fish on my plate, suspended like a giant white-man hand puppet, awaiting my answer.

“Umm, no.”

“I didn't think you had plans for that one,” he said, popping it into his mouth. “Now, tell me, Jean, reading any of the English poets? I mean the greats. Keats? Blake? Who've you tried?” and before I could answer, my dad had spread wasabi on the green plastic separator things that act as some kind of plate decoration and lobbed it into his mouth and began chomping on it.

“Dad! Jesus Christ!” Katharine yelled. “That's a
garnis
!”

“A what?” my dad said with wide eyes, as if he had eaten a blowfish.

“A
garnis
! It's plastic. Decoration. You're not supposed to eat it!” Eleanor said, looking around to see if the waitstaff was watching. My dad pulled the green plastic matter from his mouth and laid it on his empty plate.

That Thanksgiving was the last time he ever took us out to dinner. He'd run out of his house money. That piece of mackerel was the official start of destitute divorced dad.

 

 

 

He was early to pick us up for Christmas. Ever since I can remember, my father never had anywhere else he had to be.

He was sitting on one of the couches in the lobby with a bag of presents on either side of his knees. He wore a hat; he still bought and wore hats, mostly from this prehistoric preppy store on Madison and Forty-sixth, F. R. Tripler. Tripler's was his only charge account, so you could count on some things from there at Christmas. The men's section may have been passable, but the women's clothes were the most outdated, buttoned-up, queer shit imaginable. What old money wear in menopause.

He got up and gave his usual huge greeting. “Jean-Joe! Eleanora! Julita! Katarina! Mer-ry Christmas! Sit. Sit. Have I got some great things for you all.” My dad, hat and gray overcoat still on, began taking presents out of the bags, all unwrapped. My father had never wrapped a present ever. It totally threw off your timing as the person getting the gift because you could plainly see what you were being given as he reached across people to hand it to you and out of politeness you had to maintain a façade of suspense as he passed the unclothed gift your way. There were biographies he got half-price at the Strand, a button-down shirt with a silk tie at the collar from Tripler's that Pat Buckley might wear to jury duty, and then the worst kind of present my dad gave—an expensive item, like a fancy camera that you knew meant he wasn't going to eat for a week.

We sat in the lobby opening presents, thankful that because Mom was new to the building we didn't know any of the people coming and going to their holiday festivities, passing us and giving the raised eyebrow to the doorman, Mario. Katharine and Eleanor, the two people in our family who had incomes, entry-level though they were, made a couple overtures to actually going somewhere for brunch, but Dad cheerfully dismissed these wacky notions.

“Oh, I think we're good right here. What do you think about that
OED
, Jean-Joe? There's a manual that comes with it on how to use it and also a magnifying glass, which, even at your age, you're going to need, believe me. Oh, it's wonderful. Your life as you know it? Gone, I'm telling ya. You'll thank me later.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You're very welcome.”

My father then reached into one of his bags and pulled out a large hunk of Parmesan cheese.

“I thought my bio of Rebecca West smelled a little funny.” Katharine giggled.

“Murray's cheese shop on Bleecker.” He pulled a knife out of his herringbone overcoat and chiseled off a flaky hunk. “Eleanor? Can I interest you in some of the finest of Parma?”

Eleanor, on the verge of tears, uttered, “No thank you.”

“All right, then, terrible decision but you are free to make it. Katarina?”

“Sure. Yummy.” He handed Katharine the crumbly cheese.

“Help yourself to some of that good bread. Now, who else would like a bit? Julia, what's the name of the doorman again?”

“Mario, but he doesn't want any cheese, Dad,” Julia said.

“Nonsense. It's Christmas and he's working. Where's your spirit?”

“Please don't offer him any cheese, Dad,” Eleanor pleaded.

“What is wrong with you girls?” My dad stood up and then yelled across the lobby, “Mario! Mario!”

Mario put his
Daily News
down.

“Can I interest you in some of the finest Parmesan this side of the Mediterranean?”

“Oh no, thank you, sir.”

“You're not being polite, are you, Mario?”

“Dad, he doesn't want any cheese,” I said.

“Okay, I will have some. Thank you.”

“Terr-ific. Okay, let's see here . . .” And my dad began jabbing at the Parmesan with his knife again. “Where are you from, Mario?”

“Italy.”

“What part?” My dad placed a chunk of cheese in Mario's palm.

“Umbria.”

“Umbria, my God, that's gorgeous land! Your family farmers or winemakers or what?” My dad nibbled on a bit of cheese as if he were at a cocktail party in Southampton.

Just then the doors of one of the two elevators opened and Mom and Phil Sully got out. Mom's eyes went to the cheese on the lobby table, the presents everywhere, the crumbly baguette on the table, Dad, Mario and us girls. While it didn't reflect favorably on Dad, it wasn't what you'd call a moment of glory for Mom or Phil Sully, either. Mr. Sully probably wouldn't want the New York Bar Association knowing he was dating a client. Mom simply walked through it like a rain shower.

“Steve. Girls.” Mario trotted to the door and held it for them as they walked out of the lobby into the sharp December chill and Eighty-seventh Street.

My father didn't miss a beat. “Katarina, I am about two weeks away from all my Fitzgerald research being done. Did I tell you that? I wish to hell that I could find that he once ran into a blaze and pulled out an orphan. Jesus, the more you know, the more difficult it is to like the guy.”

Dad's divorced-dad game was strong: impromptu passes made at cashiers at the IGA in Amagansett with whom we had gone to grade school, amorous lunges at Julia's college friend's older sister out on his little Sunfish sailboat followed by friend needing to be driven to the train to get back to the city immediately, condoms falling out of his pocket when he stuck out his hand to meet your friend's elderly mother at the gas station.

A few months later Mom decided to ditch the Upper East Side for Florida, which seemed like a gutsy divorced-ladystarting-over kind of move. My parents were physically farther apart than they had ever been. But there was some backpedaling after Mom was “asked” to leave the complex where she lived in the Sunshine State after only a few months, at which point she opted to crash in the West Village at my father's studio while she looked for her own place. My father had moved back to Manhattan from Amagansett after his relationship with a local woman named Pity ended, as one can imagine, badly. Reconvening in the West Village my parents now ate together, went to movies and checked each other in and out of the hospital. Some people might call this dating.

“Hi, baby. It's Mom. I'm at your father's.”

Katharine and I had gotten an apartment in Brooklyn together after I graduated from Purchase. I scrounged through the ashtray looking for the roach Katharine had overlooked.

“I've left Florida,” she said, pausing to let her line “land,” as they say in the theater. The problem with my mother was that everything she said had a big landing. “I'm no longer on speaking terms with my hairdresser” went high into the air and came down at your feet with as much of a thud as “They've found a growth the size of a brioche under my left armpit.”

“I've left Florida” sounded like she had left her Venezuelan dance teacher/lover and was now back with my father.

The last time I spoke with her, my mother said she was doing okay but that she missed minorities terribly.

“You left Florida because you miss black people?” I asked.

“Not just black people, Jeanne. Gays and Latinos and the Chinese and the Koreans.”

“Lesbians?”

“Actually I've never thought lesbians add that much to the city, frankly. Anyway, I'm at your father's.”

I sparked up the ashy doob I had gleaned. “Uh-huh.”

“He's being absolutely impossible.”

“Really?” I said in a loud, shocked way. My mother was the perfect “stone call,” because she herself made no sense. People often make the mistake of trying to bring people to their level of sanity or sobriety or intelligence or what have you. A much more pleasurable option is to go to their special place for a few hours.

“I slept on a bed with no sheets last night. He said his sheets were at the Chinese place when I arrived. I said, ‘Steve, do you mean to tell me you don't have any spare sheets?' The man doesn't have a set of spare sheets, dolly.”

I puffed further on the doob, but it had gone out. I relit it.

“And he's sleeping on that rubber thing in the living room.”

“The raft.”

“The what?”

“The raft.” Dad had a primitive inflatable mattress, extremely narrow, that looked like an actual raft you'd use at the beach. The air would go out of it as you slept so you woke up with a flat piece of rubber between you and the floor. He offered it up to relatives and friends who were in town.

“Stay at the Carlyle if you'd like, Hereford,” he'd say, “but you're more than welcome to lay your head at my place during the trial. Very comfortable. Absolutely.”

 

 

 

“Oh my God, it is a raft. The man is fifty-five years old and he's sleeping on a raft.”

“On the banks of West Fourth Street. Sounds kinda Bob Dylany.”

“Believe me, Bob Dylan has a nice suite up at the Waldorf. I guarantee you if you go to visit Bob Dylan there's sheets on the bed. Total insanity.”

“Why don't you leave?”

“The man doesn't have two nickels to rub together. Did you know your father sometimes sleeps upright, in his computer chair?”